Chronicle 11 -1979: Matriculation Day

On the Saturday at the end of the first week at Oxford, all the new students had to take part in the matriculation ceremony at the Sheldonian Theatre.  Matriculation was where you became an official member of the university and agreed to abide by its rules. The University even had its own police (known as bulldogs), courts and even laws. The death penalty, for example, remained in place under Oxford University laws for some time after it was abolished in the rest of the country. 

For matriculation and during exams you had to wear full academic dress, or sub fusc.  For men this was a dark suit, a white shirt, white bow tie, gown and mortar board. And dark socks. They took these things seriously (especially the socks). In my third year someone was not permitted to enter the Examination Schools to do his finals because his socks were red. He had to rush back to College and change them.  All of these clothes I had to buy, at great expense, in my first few days.  I went up to C's room that Saturday morning to pick her up before breakfast before the ceremony. Her new friend K, from upstairs in her staircase, was there too, both were dressed in the women's sub fusc of black skirt and tights, white shirt, black ribbon tie (rather like what people in westerns used to wear), gown and a soft cap instead of a mortar board. Women, at around this time were allowed to wear black trousers instead of a skirt but this was very rare and mainly was taken  advantage of by Americans.

The two girls both looked very smart. K was a couple of inches taller than C and was built like A; slim and boyish.  She had short, thick, dark brown hair and deep brown eyes. C was rather taciturn and enjoyed companionable silence. K never stopped talking. Ever. There was a character called Kiki the Frog on a children's TV programme called Hector's House at the time and we both thought that K was very like Kiki..  When C wasn't in my company she was in K's, that first year. We all became very close friends. 

My biggest issue that day was tying my bow tie; something I had never done before. There were no YouTube videos to watch then, just a series of frankly baffling diagrams included in the grey plastic wallet from Shepherd & Woodward.  Given I had trouble tying my shoelaces then, a bow tie was well beyond my capabilities. C tried to help but we were getting nowhere. 

"For heaven's sake!" chipped in K. She stood in front of me and tied it in about ten seconds. She explained that she always did her father's for him. He was a prominent barrister (although K was not doing Law) and went to many formal events in London. 

Breakfast was never very exciting; porridge, cereals, a roll and butter, orange juice and tea. On Saturdays you could pay extra for a (very small) cooked breakfast. Not many people went to Saturday breakfast, although that day it was busy. After breakfast we had to sign the register, to become a member of College and then we all trooped into the seventeenth century Sheldonian Theatre  for the ceremony. much of which was in Latin, of course.  It was on the same site as the Bodleian Library, adjoining Radcliffe Square.  K said that Radcliffe Square had been called the most beautiful square in the world and it was certainly stunning, on what was a bright, sunny morning. The first half of the month was quite warm for the time of year with a lot of sun and temperatures in the high sixties (we had not moved to Centigrade at that point, in Britain) . However, my recollection of Oxford was that it was mostly grey and damp and the limestone buildings seemed to soak up moisture like a sponge. In the summer it could be truly lovely but we were not there from mid-June through to the second week of October, so we missed most of the nice weather. Oxford sits in a bowl, surrounded by hills and the rain used to hang above it in a permanent gloomy cloud, as though afflicted by some curse of the rain Gods. 

After the matriculation ceremony we had to return to College for a freshers photo of the whole year, taken in the main quad. We balanced precariously on planks for the photo (not C and K as they were with the little people at the front) while the photographer messed about. I was looking to see if there were any other nice looking girls in the year and noticed F, another petite redhead I had met earlier in the week, J a statuesque medic and R who had a thick mop of blonde hair. Frankly, there were not a lot of other attractive women there, I decided.  C and F had a chat and discovered they were being mistaken for each other, given they both had long red hair and were the same height. 

C and I had wanted a quiet rest of the day to get on with some jobs and shopping but we hadn't counted on the party atmosphere of matriculation day, where many students were already drinking Champagne at 10.30 in the morning. We were invited into one of our fellow fresher's rooms for drinks before lunch, although C and I slipped away just before lunch to get our washing on the go in the subterranean laundry. Between us we managed to work out how the coin operated washing machine worked and, fortunately, C had washing powder. I tried to kiss C in the laundry (so to speak) but she was worried her lipstick would smudge so told me I had to wait until later. I kissed her neck instead (she had put her hair up), which she always enjoyed and gently caressed her bust while she ground her bottom against my groin. We left our clothes getting 'frisky with each other', according to C (although a lot of her clothes were silk and needed hand washing) and went to lunch. Most people, including C, had kept their sub fusc on but I had rid myself of my suit when I went up to get my laundry. I was not used to wearing a suit and tie and didn't feel comfortable in it at all. 

At lunch, everyone was in high spirits (some people's spirits were rather higher than others) and we were invited to drinks after dinner in Hall by one of the second year law students. C decided this student was very 'dreamy' but she had, I discovered, a thing about posh boys from public schools. This was a common female affliction at Oxford, I discovered. The public school boys took great advantage of panting young Grammar school girls but discarded them like crumpled (and dare we say, stained) tissues, having had their way with them in the first week or so.  I eventually worked out a system of identifying and consoling these rebound ladies to both of our mutual satisfaction. The biggest hunting ground was the Oxford Union Bar, where eager young fresher girls would display themselves quite unashamedly, as we will see in a future episode.  

We went shopping after lunch, having recovered our washing and were joined by K, somewhat to our annoyance, as her presence stopped any tactile moments in the hidden recesses of places like The Paperback Shop. This, an offshoot of the venerable Blackwells, was one of my favourite shopping destinations and had an excellent selection of Dragon's Dream SF and fantasy art books by the likes of Roger Dean and other artists whose work I had enjoyed on the pages of Science Fiction Monthly. I also bought the first couple of novels by a (now notorious) author called John Norman whose novels about the planet Gor, started as a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs-style SF adventure and gradually transformed, over multiple novels, to be about the sexual submission of women. The first ones, before they became incredibly repetitive, were good mindless reading, after a day of struggling with Roman or Criminal Law.  While I looked at the science fiction section C appeared brandishing a book with a familiar white cover. 

"Look! Emmanuelle! You can buy it for me and read it to me!" said C.  Typically, she did not offer to buy it herself but I thought it was probably worth 60p to get her worked up. "Read this!" she had her finger stuck in a passage. I read it and discovered it was a graphic description of fellatio. 

"Tonight! If you buy it for me!"  She gave me a naughty smile. Who could resist? "Don't let K see it, though!" 

K was browsing the Penguin Classics upstairs. C squeezed my groin and went upstairs to distract her while I paid for the books. I found all of my art materials, paper and charcoal, in WH Smiths.  I also bought some Blue-tack and more arty postcards for the wall of my room in Athena (there were no rules about not sticking pictures to the wall in those days).  We went to a little place called The Nosebag in St Michael's Street, opposite the Oxford Union, for early afternoon tea and a scone. Both the girls were still in sub fusc (or 'sub fucs' as K, rather naughtily, called it) but then so were many of the other freshers around town that day. 

"What are you going to draw?" asked K, looking at my large drawing pad, sticking out the top of my Smiths bag. 

"I don't know," I said, deliberately not looking at C who was kicking me under the table. 

"You could draw me!" said K. 

"I think not!" said C, firmly. 

"You could draw us both!" persisted K. "C could be a pre-Raphaelite maiden and I could be her ardent Spanish (she was part Spanish) lover. A boy lover of course. Not a girl. Although that might be fun too!"  C looked interested, at this point. 

"Did you see how she was flirting with you?" said C, later, as I had another tea back in C's room, at about three in the afternoon. K had come back with us but had nipped off to the loo. C was drinking one of her German rosehip teas. This looked lovely, with its clear red appearance but tasted like iron filings. All of her fruit teas were disgusting but, again, she preferred the look to the taste. She also had a thing about lebkuchen, a sort of soft, spicy German biscuit. Frankly, I would rather have a ginger nut. Lebkuchen were difficult to get and expensive and therefore, for C, desirable. I said I didn't think K was flirting with me at all. "Yes she was!" insisted C. I said it was more like that K was flirting with C. C agreed that there was an element of that. "She has a lovely bottom, Don't you think she has a lovely bottom?" asked C. I thought carefully before answering. 

"It's OK. Not as nice a yours!" C smiled and gave me a kiss. In fact, K had a sensational arse, high and taut, which she emphasised by wearing skintight denims which C and I wondered how she actually got into; they were so tight. C gave me another kiss and soon we were snogging away as C had removed her lipstick and make-up after lunch.  K didn't knock when she returned but we just had time to break apart before she came into the room. 

"What are you two talking about?" asked K, looking suspicious. 

"Your bottom!" said C. 

"What about it?" asked K trying to look over her shoulder at it. C told her how nice it was and proceeded to stroke and squeeze it while looking at me as if to say 'she won't let you do this'. K asked C if she had any biscuits which she didn't. I said I had some and so we relocated to my room, which K hadn't seen before. She was very jealous of my gas fire which we soon had going, as the temperature was starting to drop. K also liked my big hospital bed, which was a foot wider than the beds in the girls' rooms. She lay down on it and rolled about, much to C's annoyance, I could tell.  C had never been in my bed, as we had all our sensual episodes on the rug in front of the gas fire. The two girls helped stick my arty postcards to the wall.  Most were of female nudes and the two would often buy me another card if they saw one in the shops. Both girls lay in front of my fire, drinking tea, with a plate of chocolate digestives between them, while I sat in my armchair and contemplated getting my drawing things out. C was stroking K's thigh, which I found very exciting, particularly as K seemed to like having her thigh stroked.  K liked my rooms but I moaned about the fact that I had to go downstairs to fill the kettle and that the bathroom was in the basement. She said she couldn't get by without her washbasin and I said how cold and horrible the bathroom was on my staircase.  K, who always knew everything that was going on, said that there was one nice bathroom in college, on the staircase next to the law library but it was nearly always occupied.  I decided to have a look at it, although I didn't mention it to K. 

Then there was a knock on my door and it was E, a boy from my school who was at another college, coming to say hello. I was delighted to invite him into a room strewn with lovely girls. You could see from his face he was envious as he was at one of the remaining all male colleges. He was doing the same subject as K, so they had a good chat. He didn't say anything but we could tell he wasn't settling in that well with the workload, even one week in.  In his subject they had  a key exam at the end of the first term which they had to pass in order for them to remain at Oxord. Someone had said that Oxford first years in this subject had the highest suicide rate of any academic course in the world except for the Japanese Civil Service entrance exams. K saw my school friend out of College so they could chat about some subject thing and said she would see us at dinner. 

I asked C if she had told K about us. She said she hadn't and wasn't intending to. I told her she couldn't moan if K was flirting, then. She then said that I had insisted K wasn't flirting and now I was changing my testimony. C was one of those people who liked picking arguments for the sake of it. No doubt this was why she became a lawyer. I told her that if she didn't stop it I'd spank her. "You can't say things like that unless you back up your statements with action!" she said. I reached out, from where I was sitting in my armchair, and made a grab for her.  Laughing, she leaped out of the way and I chased her around the room before grabbing her around the waist, dropping back on to my chair and pulling her over my knees. I spanked her a couple of times through her thick wool skirt. 

"That's no punishment. That's pathetic!" she said. I started to undo the buttons of her skirt and she wriggled encouragingly. "That's better!" she said as I pulled her skirt down her thighs. I wasn't actually finding the situation sexual, just a joke, until that point, when I saw that she was wearing black silk knickers and black stockings. I stroked her silk clad posterior and she squirmed, invitingly, across my lap.  I spanked her a couple of times but not very hard. "Harder than that!" she goaded me. "I need to tingle!" I started to pull her knickers down and she helpfully lifted her hips for me. This time I gave a her a couple of sharp wacks. "Oh! Better!" she cried. Her soft bottom quivered and a pink patch appeared.  I had never, ever even dreamed of hitting a girl and found it quite difficult to do so but she seemed to genuinely enjoy it and I could see (and smell) that she was getting moist. I was also entranced by her neat anus; the first time I had really seen one close up. I spanked her a couple more times. 

"That's enough!" I said, tickling her parts with my finger. "You weren't that naughty!" I pulled her knickers back up. 

"You can't leave me like this! You need to finish me off!" she wailed. 

"Later!" I said. "Anyway, it's time for Dr Who!" 

"Cruel person!" she said, pulling her skirt up and buttoning it up, again. We went to watch Dr Who in the JCR TV room. It was packed but we were glad we would be able to keep up with it while we were at College, as it was so popular. It was the classic story, City of Death and parts of it had been expensively shot in Paris. I was glad that C liked Dr Who as well.  After dinner we went around to the second year lawyer's room with some of the other freshers. He had a really large room decorated with pictures of women cut out from the pages of Vogue, which C thought was very stylish. C flirted outrageously with all the male lawyers there and drank enough Port to get her giggly. Every social event at Oxford seemed to be accompanied by alcohol and C was small and not as used to it as I was. 

As soon as we returned to my room and I had started the gas fire, C jumped me and wrestled me to the rug in front of the fire. We started snogging and she pulled at my clothes, frantically stripping me completely. I got her down to her black underwear. Although I removed her bra and knickers, I hesitated over her suspender belt and stockings. 

"Don't know what to do, eh? Off or on?" she teased. It was true, I loved the way her black suspender belt and stockings framed her bright orange pussy. I placed the palm of my hand over her soft, hot mound and rubbed, grinding the heel of my palm on her stiff little clitoris. She had very prominent parts, which I loved. She straddled my thigh and rubbed against my leg with her hot pussy. She knelt between my legs, massaging my cock. She started to suck my knob. "Are you going to come for me!" she asked, popping off me. "Is it building? Are you going to spurt?" 

"Any second!" I sighed, as she continued to gently massage me with her hand. Suddenly, she stood up. 

"Get dressed!" she ordered. 

"What? Now?" I said, having been just seconds from coming. 

"Yes! I want chocolate! Go and get it for me!" She stood there with her hands on her hips trying to look assertive. I frowned. "You spank me, wind me up and then don't finish me off! Now you can see what it is like!" 

"You're evil!" I said, resignedly picking up my shirt. When I was dressed she rubbed herself up against me, seductively, still just dressed in her black stockings. 

"I'm not evil, just a femme fatale!" she said. 

I had to go across the end of the quad to the vending machine next to the law library. I knew that C liked Lion Bars, which at that time had only been available a year or so. I put in the money and pushed the button and watched the spiral rotate until it fell into the metal hopper. The first time we had used it C had said how the 'screwing built anticipation and then the drop into the hopper was like an orgasm'.  She did seem to think about sex quite a lot. And chocolate.  J, C's tutorial partner (who she fancied but thought was gay) came out of the law library and asked me where C was, as he wanted to talk to her about the next essay.  He said that she wasn't in her room and had run into K who had said to try my room but he didn't know which room I was in. I said I didn't know where she was. He then said that D had said that C was always in my room. I explained that I had a gas fire and she didn't. He looked at me suspiciously but left, fortunately. 

I took the opportunity to go upstairs and look at the semi-mythical 'nice bathroom' K had told us about. It was, indeed, large as was the bath and was warm. It even had plants in it, in pots. It looked very promising. As I came down the stairs H, from Scotland, was also in front of the vending machine. 

"Hah!" he exclaimed in delight. He told me that if you put the money in and pushed two buttons simultaneously you could sometimes get two things for the price of one. We tried it on Lion Bars and sure enough I got two. Given the amount of chocolate C needed this could be very useful. I was on my way back to my room and then ran into M. from the staircase next door. He wanted to chat too and so by the time I got back to my rooms I had been away about twenty minutes. C was gone but had written me a note. 'Too slow! Back soon. Noel can look after you!' Noel was her hideous dead (obviously) pine marten stole. She had draped it over the arm of my chair. It was a nineteen twenties narrow fur wrap, which still had the head, feet and tail of the creature on it, with a sort of peg effect where the jaws used to be, so she could wrap it around her shoulders and clip it onto itself. She treated it more like a pet than an article of clothing. It was vile but she loved it and wore it a lot. She would stroke it and talk to it. She also had an old, brown fur coat which made her look like a small bear.  People didn't worry about wearing fur in those days. I noticed that she had put her little plastic contact lens pots on my mantelpiece. I looked at my watch. It was gone ten o'clock. 

She came back to my room about ten minutes later. She smelled of a floral perfume. I hadn't noticed her wearing perfume before and I complimented her on it She said it was Chanel No 19 eau de parfum. She explained that this was more expensive than eau de toilette. I had not appreciated all the different grades of scent. She had changed out of her sub fusc and was now wearing a dark blue cocktail dress with sequins on it. A bit odd to start changing outfits at gone ten, I thought. 

"Are you going out?" I asked. She had a cloth bag with her. 

"Where is my chocolate?" she said, ignoring my question. I opened my biscuit tim and showed her the three Lion Bars. I told her about the trick of getting two bars out. She looked pleased. She looked even more pleased when I told her about the bathroom I had looked at. 

"What's in the bag?" I asked her. 

"Things!" she said, enigmatically. She opened the door to my bedroom and went inside. She came back out again fairly quickly. "Cold!" She wanted me to leave the door open so it could pick up some heat from the gas fire but I explained that you ended up with two not very warm rooms rather than one warm one and one cold one. She unwrapped a Lion Bar and had me hold it for her so she could bite pieces off it; feeding her like an animal. She gobbled it down remarkably quickly. Two for one would definitely be an advantage. "I've decided to give you a present!" she said. I looked for her bag but she must have taken it into my bedroom, oddly. I told her that I didn't really need a present but it was lovely thought. "You have to unwrap it!" she said, turning her back on me and showing me the buttons down the back of her dress. 

"This does look like a lovely present!" I said, undoing the first button and kissing her neck, after scooping her long red hair over one shoulder. Another button. Another kiss. She said I was very good at unwrapping. Soon she was able to step out of her dress and turned around. She hadn't just changed her outerwear but her underwear too. She was now wearing blue silk and lace French knickers and a matching camisole. The latter was very sheer and her rosy nipples were visible through it. She had pale blue stockings and a suspender belt on too. She looked sensational, as I told her. She grinned. 

"Now I'm going to unwrap you too!" She did so but stripped me off completely, so I was standing in front of her naked, my cock at full elevation. She stepped towards me and took hold of it. "What do you call it?" 

"Sorry?" 

"What do you call it? Don't all men give their's names?" she asked, massaging it gently. I said I hadn't got a name for it. She squatted down in front of me and kissed it. I stroked her hair. I bent down and pulled her camisole over her head. She stood up and it was my turn to squat down as I pulled her French knickers down over her thighs. I kissed her orange bush and smelled her musky scent. She was very aroused. I flicked my tongue across her clitoris. She was undoing her suspenders and I gently rolled her stockings down. She held out her hand. "Come!" She led me into the chilly bedroom and pulled back my sheet and blankets. There was a hot water bottle in the middle of the bed, which she must have put in there earlier. She pushed it further down the bed and climbed in. I got in after her. Despite the warm patch, it was quite cold and we cuddled up underneath the covers. Soon we were kissing and rubbing against each other. I slipped my knee between her thighs and felt her hotness on my skin. She writhed as I pressed against her pussy. I was on top of her now and she guided me with her hand so I was completely between her thighs. I was a bit worried that I might squash her but I supported myself on my forearms as we kissed, liquidly. My cock was rubbing against her bush and she was gently moving her pelvis. Her hand slid between our bodies, gripping me. "I want it inside me!" she said. 

"Really? Are you sure!" I asked, my heart pounding. Everything seemed to go into slow motion. We had warmed up the bed and although the lights were off in my bedroom the desk light and fire were still on in my living room. There was enough light to see her lovely face. 

"Yes! Now!" she said. Was this going to be It? It, It, It? I  prodded at her pussy gently with my cock but realised it wasn't as easy as that. She had let go of me so I took myself in hand and extended my index finger. I located her wet entrance and guided my erection down my finger until my knob entered her entrance. I paused and looked at her, giving her an opportunity to change her mind.  She looked at me, smiled and put her hands on my bottom, pulling me closer. I wriggled up the bed an inch or too and gently pushed in. I expected some resistance; a barrier, even, but there was just hot, liquid softness that felt like it was sucking me in. I pushed in up to the hilt and paused. "Oh!" she sighed. 

"Are you alright? Does it hurt? I asked, anxiously. 

"No! It's lovely. Strange but lovely!" she said and we kissed. I just lay there looking at her smiling face, the head of my cock lodged deep inside her hot cunt. "I think you're supposed to move!" she said, after a while. I was so excited that I thought that if I did move I might come instantly. I should have got a Durex. They had a machine in the gents next to the JCR. Right by the vending machine, in fact. But she hadn't suggested one and I didn't want to shatter the moment. I pulled gently out and then pushed back in. "Oh God!" she said, biting her lip. It, It, It! I thought. We were doing It! "Keep doing that!" I did but very slowly and gently. We kissed as I continued to slide in and out of her, very, very slowly. I couldn't hold it any longer. the sensation, physically and emotionally was too overwhelming.  I pulled out of her and came all over her tummy. She covered my face in kisses. I knew she hadn't come so I slid off her and put my fingers inside her and started to flick her clitoris with my thumb. She can't have been very far behind me because it only took about two minutes. We lay together quietly, kissing each other occasionally. "We've made love! We're lovers!" she said, at last. I couldn't think of anything to say. I was dumbstruck. We had been together just over a week. "I need the loo!" she said, after a while. 

"I do too!" I said. We got out of bed. She pulled out some slippers, a black sweat top and trousers from her bag, then a toothbrush and toothpaste. 

"I'm staying the night!" she explained. "In our lovers' garret!" 

"How lovely!" I said. She opened the door carefully, looked around and then dashed out. I put my pyjamas and dressing gown on and moved the hot water bottle in the bed. I was looking for any signs of blood on my sheets but there was nothing, just a damp patch. The bed smelled of sex, though. Sex. It! I sniffed my fingers, C had a very strong smell. Stronger than any other girls I had been with. Not unpleasant but very musky, although there were overtones of Chanel No. 19 on my body too. 

She returned shortly, smelling of peppermint and I went downstairs to the small bathroom in the next staircase. My cock smelled of C and I wondered if I should try and wash it in the washbasin but thought better of it.  Anyway, I liked the smell. When I got back to my room C was naked in my bed, shivering. I stripped off too, switched off the lights and the gas fire and we cuddled up. I lay on my side and she clamped onto my back. She put her hand over my hip and gently clasped my genitals. 

"I love matriculating!" said C with a laugh. "Tomorrow we can matriculate all day!" Despite the rather cramped bed we soon drifted off. It, It, It! I thought, as I started to doze off, C's perky breasts pressed against my back and I could feel her soft bush brushing my bottom. Matriculation day! I had entered more than the university.  Marvellous!

Chronicle 10 - 1979 - I am Curious, Orange

I was woken up by my mother. "There is a big envelope from Oxford!" she cried.

"Don't get excited!" I said, pulling on my dressing gown and walking downstairs. I had been having a lovely dream about A. We were doing it on the beach. It! It! It! "My entrance exam was rubbish and so was my interview. I have no chance of getting into Oxford!" I said, confidently.  I was wrong.

Two weeks later, I went into school for the last time, to pick up some stuff from my locker. 

"How did it go?" asked my English teacher, anxiously, intercepting me in the school entrance hall. "We haven't heard from you. You are the last one!" I liked him a lot and he had been a good part of the reason that I chose Oxford over Cambridge, as he had studied there, where one of his tutors had been JRR Tolkien, impressively.  I told him about my strange interview and he thought that I hadn't got in.

"Don't you know?" I asked. I had assumed that Oxford would tell the school but they didn't. The result  only came to the candidate. I told him the good news and he actually gave me a hug. I was then shoved into the staff room, for the first time, to tell my teachers. Mrs S, the art assistant, gave me a hug and a kiss. On the lips, much to my embarrassment. The school had got more than two dozen people into Oxford or Cambridge. My History, English and Art teachers took me down to the pub for lunch. I suddenly realised that I wasn't a schoolboy any more.

"Have you been doing any more life drawing?" asked my Art teacher.

"Not really," I said. "Not had any suitable models!"

"What about your hairdresser?" asked my History teacher. I couldn't believe the teachers knew about that.  Mrs S hadn't heard the story but the History teacher wouldn't give any further detail other than that I had had a "famous" experience. How had they found this out?

"I'm not surprised, you are such a nice looking young man," said Mrs S. "I bet you'll cut a swathe through the girls at Oxford!" I certainly hoped so. My total interaction with girls in the last eighteen months had been my moment of passion with Mandy the hairdresser, on the floor of J's bathroom, five months before and I felt a fraud about that, as everyone, now including my teachers, thought that I had done It. And I hadn't.

Christmas was relaxing for the first time in years as I had no tests to do in the first week of term. My Uncle, the one with the boat, had arranged a job for me with a friend of his who owned an import-export business at Heathrow airport. My mother dropped me off at the bus station on the way to work and I took the bus to the cargo terminal. The place where I was working was in a large warehouse building, which isn't there any more. Lots of freight firms had offices there with warehouses on the ground floor and a small office overlooking the warehouse on the top floor. There was a team of three or four drivers who worked out of the warehouse and the office upstairs, where I was going to work, was run by a short balding man and his two female assistants. One was an older lady (as I thought of her) in her late twenties with short, dyed blonde hair, which looked like high tensile straw. The other was a girl a couple of years older than me,who had the most unprepossessing face, with a complexion like a saucepan full of cold porridge and a nose like an elephant seal that was far too big for her small face. Unfortunately, she was also unpleasant in character (unlike the older lady, who was nice). What was remarkable about this unremarkable girl was, that at the age of twenty, she had never seen the sea.  Nowhere in Britain is more than seventy miles from the sea and we were rather closer than that. They were very different people from those I had met before. There would be no hoped for passion in the office.

The drivers were funny and nice and had an interesting collection of naked women centrefolds on the walls of the warehouse. They also used to exchange men's magazines between them but these were the less sophisticated type of magazine like Whitehouse and Park Lane, of largely skanky looking women spreading everything as much as they could. Funnily, one lunchtime I went down to take them a piece of paperwork and they hastily covered up the magazine they were all clustered around, guiltily. 

"I prefer Club International myself," I said.  They looked shocked as they thought of me as a boy and a posh boy at that.

There was nothing to do at lunchtime except go for a walk. There were no shops, cafes or anything else in the building or nearby. It was an urban desert. Outside, the stink of aviation fuel in the air was so strong you could taste it. I used to walk up to one of the reservoirs near the airport and do a circular walk just to get out, even in the rain. I soon got the hang of the job, which involved pricing cargo, finding a carrier and filling out air waybills. It was really boring and I hated being in a small windowless office being seethingly resented by the younger girl.

One day I was down in the warehouse and a French driver arrived in a lorry. The drivers were completely failing to communicate with him and he had no English whatsoever. My French was rubbish (I only got my O-level because the lady French Assistant fancied me and was very generous in my assessed oral exam) but it was better than the drivers'. They were amazed that I could ask him to follow us to the office, ask for his papers and offer him a cup of coffee in French. The following week I discovered that the boss had upped my pay by 25%. I was asked to do more and more and C, the younger girl, was getting more and more resentful.

I nearly quit but then I got my first month's pay. It was a lot of money for me.  Hundreds of pounds. Just for filling out a few forms. I went to Kingston and bought a huge black Panasonic radio cassette player.  It cost a staggering £149.99 in 1979! I could connect it to my stereo amplifier and transfer my records onto cassetes for university. The following month I bought a load of records. With Classics for Pleasure records at 99p each, I started to build my classical record collection, Not just that but I added some non-classical stuff too, including Gordon Giltrap's Fear of the Dark which I had heard on the radio the previous summer, some ELO and the first album by The Police.

I discovered that about half a mile's walk from the warehouse was a corner shop which had a huge selection of men's magazines. I started to buy one a week. Mainly Penthouse, Men Only and Club International, although I thought that the brightly lit studio photography on the later two wasn't as good as it had been two years ago and the girls weren't showing as much as they had a couple of years before when O and I went through a stack in his house. I enjoyed the anticipation of taking the magazine home, then locking myself in the bathroom and breathlessly discovering each pictorial. It was the only sexual activity I was getting.

The office had a girly calendar in it, above the older woman's desk, which would be very surprising now but wasn't even commented on then and, indeed, it was the older woman's job to turn the page every month. It wasn't just a topless one either. I think it might have originated from Mayfair.  One of the pictures was one of Linda Lusardi which I was particularly taken with (they were all discussed as each new one appeared) to the extent that the older lady gave it to me on my last day, in August.

When the picture first appeared, earlier in the year, we were talking, for some reason, about pinup calendars from the past, from the time when the pictures were all paintings. I mentioned that I did a lot of drawing and she immediately asked if I did nudes.  I said I had done some, yes.  All artists did, I continued, pretentiously.  The office boss asked me to bring some in, surprisingly.

The next day they all asked to see my pictures but I hadn't brought them as I thought that they were joking. They persisted, however. I went home that day and selected a few of A but didn't include the Klimt like one of her with her legs apart. They did include breasts and pubic hair, though.

At lunchtime the next day I had to lay them out on my desk. Any artist gets nervous when presenting his work to others for the first time and, given the nature of the pictures and who I was presenting them too, I was really nervous. They stood around the desk in silence, worryingly.

"These are good! Really, really good! Are they your girlfriend?" asked the older lady, at last.  I told her that they were an ex-girlfriend who had moved to Scotland several years ago. One of the drivers came up the spiral staircase from the warehouse and soon I had the whole office in there. There were questions about why I hadn't gone on to do Art and who my girlfriend had been, which I really didn't want to drag up again. I was getting quite emotional talking about A and had to keep myself under control.  I had written to her and told her I had got into Oxford and she had sent me a nice postcard from Edinburgh, where she had gone for the day, telling me to keep writing. This had cheered me up as we hadn't really communicated for over a year, apart from Christmas cards.

A few days later I ran into the older woman in the corridor that ran the length of the building, where the loos were, and she said that she would pose for me if I needed a model.  She had a nice figure but a rather hard face and I knew she had just broken up with her boyfriend who also worked at the airport.  She was ten years older than me so I didn't take this, frankly, terrifying but gratifying, suggestion any further. I had been warned about rebound women, based on bitter experience, by one of the drivers.  Anyway, in a small office it would have been a disaster. I lied and told her that I had so much work to do before starting at university I had no spare time,  I did tell her that I thought that she would be a lovely model, though, which cheered her up. She had a splendid bottom.

On my last day, my boss suggested that I didn't go on to university but stay on and he would teach me the air freight business.  The owner of the firm said that I had got into Oxford and it was inconceivable that I do anything else.  I hadn't really thought of it as that special as so many people from my school did it but no one else in the office even knew anybody who had done A levels, let alone got into university.

I had a few weeks at home to get all my stuff ready and do things like buy mugs and a kettle. These don't seem to be allowed in student rooms anymore. Despite my expenditure I had managed to save over £1000 but I got a full living expenses grant on top, as my mother was a single parent and not earning that much. I would not be hard up at college if I was careful. One thing I discovered when I got there was that my college was very rich (apparently it owned a lot of land up north) and so our termly bills were low. Mine were just over £200 a term for food and lodging. J, from my school, was at Magdalen and his equivalent bills were more than twice mine; largely because Magdalen (pronounced 'maudlin') had had to pay £6 million to ensure their famous tower (built in 1492) didn't fall down.  Magdalen's nickname was Crumbagadalen; pronounced 'crumblin', because of the continuing restoration work.

My mother and sister took me to Oxford to start autumn term or Michaelmas, as they called it, at the beginning of October. Oxford only has eight week terms so you are actually on vacation longer than you are studying in any year. Arriving at College was like arriving on a film set. We went to the porter's lodge, a little kiosk inside the entrance, and I was given the key to my room in my Staircase. In College, you were accommodated in 'staircases', a series of rooms all off, er, a staircase. I followed the instructions and we went through a number of quadrangles, under an arch, to the far corner of the college.

"Hullo!" came a voice. "I'm so glad you got in!" It was the little redhead, C, I had met at interview. We exchanged room numbers. It turned out she was in the adjoining staircase.

"What a pretty girl!" said my mother, ever hopeful, as always.

"She's very short," observed my sister, "and her hair looks dyed!"

I explained that C was the nice girl I had met at interview and my mother was puzzled because I had described her as plain. My sister shook her head as if to say 'she is plain'. I mused on this myself as we climbed up the three flights of stairs to my room. She did seem to look a lot more attractive than I remembered, I thought, puzzled.  Also, shorter.

We got to my staircase and there, just inside the entrance, on a black metal plate, was my name painted in white paint. All the names of the people living on the staircase (about ten) had a black plate with Mr (or Miss or Dr, depending on your status), then your initials. your last name and room number. I was suddenly impressed with myself. I was at Oxford. I still couldn't believe it.

Mine was an all male staircase, disappointingly. Although my college had been mixed for six years those colleges who were taking students of the opposite sex for the first time dealt with it in different ways. In the first year most of the fresher girls in my college were put in two adjoining staircases together, quite a common practice ('apartheid'. one of the girls called it).  In New College, however, we discovered that they had installed one girl per staircase of men. This was not a success and led to comments like (as I overheard once): 'Our girl's not very good, what's your like?' and, even worse, 'our girl is very ugly but at least she is doing all our ironing'.

I had two rooms: a living room and a bedroom, both of which were long and narrow and overlooked the High (street). The living room had a gas fire but the bedroom was unheated which was not much fun given it was early October. The bedroom had a nasty maroon with black swirls lino (linoleum was invented in my home town!) floor, a bed, a chest of drawers, and a wardrobe (which rocked alarmingly on its uneven legs when you opened the door - I had to wedge it with folded card). There was a mysterious wooden box at the foot of the bed which, we discovered, contained a knotted rope. Yes, this high tech device was the fire escape, in the event that the eighteenth century building caught fire. The bed itself was quite large, at three foot six across, like my one at home. It was like (it probably was) an old hospital bed, with an iron bedstead at the head and foot.

It didn't take long to unpack, as I didn't have much stuff; pride of place going to my Panasonic radio cassette player (I still have it!) which I put on top of my bookshelf. My mother took me to lunch at the Turl Tavern (no longer there) and then bought me some tea bags, some biscuits (I was soon to discover that Oxford runs on tea, biscuits, Sherry and Port) and long life milk in the Co-op, as there didn't seem to be any fridges anywhere that we could find.  Typically, you kept your milk outside on the window ledge, which sometimes made it perilous for those below, if you muffed trying to get it back into your room. We were absolutely forbidden to have glass milk bottles on the window ledges!

After my mother and sister left, I sat in my rather stark room, feeling rather anxious about the whole thing.  I put the Bach Brandenburg concerti on the cassette player and worried about how loud I could play music. There was a knock on the door and it was the little (she claimed to be five foot two but I had my doubts) redhead, C. I was really pleased to see her and she was really pleased to have a mug of tea and a jammy dodger (or five, she had a prodigious capacity for biscuits, as I was to discover). We went down to dinner together to meet the other freshers. The rest of college hadn't started yet, apart from a few volunteer second years.

Hall, where breakfast, lunch and dinner were served, was rather strange as you all sat on long benches (I really found it odd not to have a back to my seat) at long wooden tables while the dons sat at high table (Hogwarts, basically). There were a lot of strange names for things to learn. At dinner there were two sittings: normal hall and formal hall. At formal hall you had to wear your academic gown. I had a normal, short commoners gown but C had a long gown as she had won a scholarship for being particularly swotty.  Still, I was just glad to be there.

The next few days we got to meet other people and were shown around the college, including an accommodation annex just off the main shopping street. Cornmarket, next to the famous Oxford Union. I already knew about this as this was where I had stayed at interview. The rooms there were modern and had washbasins and so I was surprised that my older room lacked basic washing facilities.  Many of the first year girls, including my new friend, C, were in a couple of modern, early sixties blocks, next door to my staircase.  These had narrower, two foot six wide beds, presumably to discourage hanky-panky, but did have a wash basin. This was useful not just for washing but, more importantly, filling the kettle. I had to go down a floor to the scout's pantry which had a sink, to do this. although it was here that I discovered a fridge. Scouts were the elderly gentlemen who made your beds every day, cleaned your rooms, washed your bedding once a week and emptied your bins.  It was another world!

Washing yourself was a trial. My rooms were on the third floor (fourth floor for Americans) but the only bathroom was in the basement, four flights of stairs below. This also housed the only WCs in the staircase. Needless to say, this basement was also unheated. To describe it as grim is an understatement. There were three WCs, then, next to those, two cubicles with baths. Beyond that were a couple of showers with wash basins opposite. The defining feature of this area of the college was that it was absolutely freezing. Damp and freezing. And smelly. Taking a shower in the morning was done as fast as humanly possible before you froze to death.  Even in the summer it was cold. On top of that the hot water was never really that hot, either, especially in the morning.

On the third evening, C came back to my room after dinner.  Her modern room was full of trendy exposed stonework (essentially the outer wall of the building the extension had been built against)  and had no carpet. Cozy it was not. I had brought my orange shaded bedside lamp from home which I had put on my desk next to my Anglepoise lamp (as I didn't have the expected bedside table). I had a nice thick rug and my gas fire (which was really efficient) and could make my room very cozy indeed.  We had more tea and I opened the bourbon biscuits I had bought that afternoon as my jammy dodgers had lasted less than 36 hours. We sat on the rug in front of the fire and she leaned against my shoulder while we had our tea. This is nice, I thought. What a nice girl!  I was racking my brains trying to think what was different about her compared with the way she was at interview.  Stupidly, it had taken me three days to work it out but now I knew what the answer was.

"What happened to your glasses?" I asked. She told me that she now wore contact lenses. I'd never met anyone who wore contact lenses.  Frankly, I found the idea of having to put things in your eyes deeply creepy.  Also, I reckoned she had lost weight and it had all gone from what I remember as a rather puffy face.  Now she had nice cheekbones and the lack of glasses revealed her face in all its delicate beauty.  She had pale, almost white, eyelashes and pale eyebrows too, which tended to give her a permanently surprised look.  Actually, I thought, she was a rather lovely girl with her almost waist length red hair.

"You're, a lovely girl!" I said, suddenly. She gave me an unexpected kiss on the cheek and snuggled up closer, so I put my arm around her waist and kissed the top of her head and she burst into tears, which is not what I was expecting.

C, it turned out, was really homesick after only three days. Her mother (her father had died a couple of years earlier) had sold their house once she knew C had got into Oxford and was planning to move south. In the meantime she was staying with her other daughter who was more than ten years older than C. C had, literally lost her home, all of her things were in storage and she felt alone and adrift. She had been at grammar school and so, like all state school pupils had done her entrance exam in the upper sixth rather than staying on into the third year, like I had. She had not had a year off like me and had only had her eighteenth birthday at the end of August, as she was one of the youngest girls in the year, like A had been. She was twenty months younger than me and was finding the whole experience a bit much.

The next day we had to go to Blackwells book shop and order some of our law books which, we had just discovered from one of the other freshers, were out of stock. See was worried about doing this on her own but, of course, I had been working in an office for eight months and thought it was no big deal. I said that I would come with her and we could do it together, She looked up at me with her red eyes and gave me a wan smile.  I kissed her forehead. Then I kissed her eyelids, tasting her salty tears. I stroked her back.  She parted her lips hesitantly and I gave her the softest, gentlest kiss I could. She kissed me back and told me I was lovely. And so are you, you gorgeous redhead, I thought, as I stroked her cheek. I had been at college less than three days and already I had kissed a lovely girl. I saw her back to her room and she gave me another shy kiss outside her door before disappearing inside. She told me to pick her up on the way to breakfast.

Next day we found the people in Blackwells not coping with what, presumably, was an annual rush.  One book we needed straight away was not on the shelves but I could see an open box of them inside the cash desk. Used to dealing with the cargo departments of recalcitrant airlines I insisted on having two copies from their box but were told that they were reserved.

"Reserved for who?" I asked. Eventually the man admitted that they were available but not inventoried yet and they needed to do the paperwork before they could put them on the shelves. I gave the man a very even look. The look I used on difficult staff at the Heathrow quarantine station (the airfreight firm I worked for imported a lot of animals).  He gave in and let us have the books. C was impressed and took my arm as we walked back to college. As we approached college I said that I would take her to lunch rather than having lunch in college. She thought this was brilliant and was hugely impressed that I had a credit card not just a cheque guarantee card.

That night she came up to my room again after dinner. I lit my gas fire and soon had the temperature of the room up again. She thanked me for helping at the bookshop and gave me another kiss. This time I was a bit more assertive with her but she matched me kiss for kiss until her tongue started to probe inside my mouth.  She pushed me down onto the rug and lay on top of me.  We lay in front of the fire kissing and tentatively exploring each other's clothed bodies with our hands. She sat up, astride my hips and pulled her chunky knit cream jumper off. She had knitted it herself. She made a lot of her own clothes and was very skilled at it. The fire, when it got going, kicked out a lot of heat so I took my jumper off too.  She was wearing a silk blouse underneath her jumper and I enjoyed stroking it.  She undid my shirt buttons and caressed my chest. I pulled her blouse out of her jeans and stroked the skin around her middle for the first time. We chatted and kissed and kissed and chatted for about two hours. By the end of the evening her blouse was undone too and I could see her silk and lace bra. I had kissed her collarbones and her belly. Eventually she said that she had to go back to her room and take her contact lenses out.  I offered to walk her back to her room.. She pointed out that it was only about forty feet from the bottom of my staircase and I needn't bother.  I asked her if she liked wine and she said yes. I said I would get some for when she next came round.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Definitely, tomorrow." We had a passionate kiss just before she left my room.

Beforedinner the next day I nipped out to Sainsbury's and wondered what to get. I hoped she didn't like Mateus Rose or the equally diabolical Blue Nun Liebfraumilch.  Given I din't want to risk leaving it in the fridge downstairs and putting a bottle out on my window sill would have been a very bad idea, I settled on a Côtes du Rhône and hoped she liked red wine.  I decided to get some cheese and crackers too.

This proved to be a wise move because at dinner we sat down only to find Mr C, a graduate student from China, sat opposite us. Mr C was from actual China, unusually, not Hong Kong and appeared not to speak any English, so we wondered what he could be possibly studying.  That day we were served curry which was one of the more disgusting things college did. It had a thick yellow-brown sauce and, shockingly, hard-boiled egg in it. That wasn't what shocked us the most, though, Vegetables were served by the scouts putting a metal dish of potatoes, green beans (yuck!) etc. between eight people. This was the first time we had had rice and they put the dish down in front of Mr C.  Mr C, lifted the lid and scooped three quarters of the contents of the bowl onto his plate and started shovelling it into his face as if he hadn't eaten for a week. C and I looked at each other and then we looked at the other people on the table who should have been having rice.  We were British so we didn't say anything.  We just ensured, between us, that the three girls there shared what was left of the rice and we didn't have anything. C kindly gave me half of hers.

We were all freshers so didn't dare ask the terrifying scouts for another bowl. There was a thing called sconcing at Oxford (Cambridge don't do it, being boring) that we had been told about on the first day, where people who broke unwritten rules at dinner (it turned out to only be formal dinners) could be called out for their offence (in Latin of course) and 'sconced' which was a seventeenth century term for a fine.  The offender then had to drink the college's sconce volume (always more than two pints and as much as three in some colleges) in beer from a special silver tankard, in one go, at the table (usually standing on it) or pay a fine.  We did not want to risk this for a bit of rice!  We had all learned our first lesson from Oxford, however: never sit near Mr C if it was rice for dinner.

We made another shocking culinary discovery immediately afterwards, when we were served 'scotch woodcock' instead of pudding. This was a savoury rather than a sweet and, it turned out, quite popular at Oxford.  It consisted of scrambled eggs on toast with anchovy paste.

"What the fucking hell is this?" asked J, a very down to earth girl from Liverpool. One thing about our college was that, at that time, more than half of the people there came from state schools, meaning they were largely normal people not old Etonians (who all went to Christ Church) and such like. "I hate eggs!" C didn't much like them either.  I didn't mind scotch woodcock but I thought it would have been better at breakfast rather than instead of pudding.

After dinner, it was cold and wet as C and I trudged back to my staircase at the very edge of the college.  C was moaning that she was hungry.

"I have cheese," I said. "and crackers!"

"I love you to bits!" said C, squeezing my hand.

C was really hungry, having not had much rice or touched the egg in the curry or the scotch woodcock, which she had given to me, She complained about them having two lots of egg in one meal. My sister didn't eat eggs either so I was familiar with this particular dislike. In fact, I have met quite a few women who don't like eggs, over the years.  C did like cheese, though and I let her scoff most of the cheddar I had bought and half of the Jacobs cream crackers. She asked if I had had Bath Olivers, as they were a superior biscuit, which I said I didn't (I had never heard of them) so she said we needed to get some.  I noted the use of 'we'. We also drank the wine, although we only managed just over half a bottle between us. We had to have it from mugs as I didn't have any wine glasses.  I realised that I would have to remedy this.

C had removed her sweater as soon as the room was warm, although I had given it a big boost before dinner. Fortunately, the gas bill was included in the termly batels (which covered living expenses) so I didn't have to stint. These days of course, there would be no chance of having an (ancient) gas fire in a student room which you had to light with a match and could take your eyebrows off if you weren't careful, as happened to one of our friends that term.  

"Let's get in front of the fire again!" said C, to my delight. We sat on the rug and started kissing again. That day she was wearing a long wool skirt (nearly all skirts were long in this period). At some point I boldly put my hand on her ankle and was soon stroking her calf through her white tights. She didn't object but just undid my shirt buttons again. As my hand crept up to her thigh she pulled away slightly and I recoiled, thinking I might have gone a bit too far. Instead, she undid the button at her waist and unzipped her skirt which she pulled off.

"Wow!" I said. She was wearing stockings, not tights, with a pretty suspender belt. None of the girls I had known before had worn stockings. This was really, really unusual at the time. She took off her blouse too and I removed my shirt. This time she lay on her back and I lay next to her on my side, running my hand over her pale body as we kissed . Her skin was so white that you could see the blue veins underneath the surface.  She was like a porcelain doll. My fingers felt the warm slice of skin between her stocking tops and her silky knickers, which had little pink flowers embroidered on them. She even made her own lingerie, I discovered, after I made appreciative comments about it.

"I even made my bra! Look!" she said, removing it. I pretended to inspect the neat stitching and the, apparently, complex fabric shapes it was made from.

"Lovely! Like your bust!" I said, deciding that I really couldn't pretend to ignore the perky display any longer.. Her breasts were, indeed, a lovely shape, close to the hemispheres of the girl I had seen on the beach the previous summer. When I had gone round to O's to look at men's magazines he had a copy of Health & Efficiency, the naturist magazine. Most of the women were professional models, I later learned but many weren't and it was a salutary lesson on what most real women's breasts looked like.  C's were just perfect, though, with the palest rose-pink coloured nipples.

"I think my bust is too small," she said, which is what A had thought too, although C's cup size was bigger than A's. Girls, I started to realise, had a thing about this and needed reassurance.  For me, then as now, shape was more important than size.

"I think they are just perfect. What a lovely shape!" I leant forward and kissed the top of one just above the nipple.

"My sister says that they are like Marie Antoinette's. Like a Champagne coupe!" said C cupping them, distractingly.

"They are!" I said.  "You are like a girl from a Boucher painting!" I was already planning to draw her naked.

"I think my colouring is more like a Renoir!" she said. "or a Degas girl!"

"I'd like to draw you!" I said. I explained that I was good at art but, unfortunately, I didn't have any art materials with me.

"Would you enjoy seeing the rest of me?" she asked. What a silly question. I nodded, my heart racing. She stood up and pushed her knickers down over her ivory thighs. I gasped, She grinned. I had never seen anything like it, not even in a magazine. The hair on her head was a dark coppery red, which she tinted with henna but her pubic hair was orange. Not orangey red.  Not burnt orange. Bright orange like an...orange.  I thought it was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen.  I reached out and stroked it, fascinated. She took off her stockings and suspender belt and went through a series of poses, standing in front of me. She had delicate rounded shoulders and a small, narrow ribcage, the bottom ribs of which were quite prominent above her flat stomach.  Her hips flared out and she had a lovely round bottom.  Her legs were short but slim. It was almost as if her bottom half was a size bigger than her top half. She was too delicate to be a Renoir girl but not as slim and girlish as the Degas girls. I thought that my assessment of Boucher girl had been spot on. "What do you think?" she asked, sitting down cross-legged in front of me and causing her breasts to bounce invitingly, as she did so.  I was soon to discover that C needed constant reassurance about almost everything. "Do you think I would be a good model?"

"I think I need to find an art shop tomorrow!" I said. She grinned.

"Let's have some more wine!  It will be like Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe!" she said. I smiled at her.  Not only was she a lovely girl but she knew about art. She made no attempt to get dressed again and seemed quite happy sitting naked on my rug and drinking wine. She thought that she could pose for drawings in my room while we drank wine and ate cheese and it would be like La Bohème, as my room was like a garret. Hopefully without the galloping consumption, I thought. She asked me if I had any Puccini on my cassettes but I didn't. She said that tomorrow night I should go to her room and she would play me some. I still had my denims on, although I had taken my socks off. If she wanted to strip me off that was fine but I wasn't going to make the first move. I had no idea what her sexual experience was and I didn't want to frighten her off. Eventually, she climbed on top of me and I stroked her naked skin from her neck down to her bottom. I was painfully stiff and wondered if she could tell.  Eventually she got dressed and left for the night. "I like being naked with you!" she said as she kissed me good night. I like it too, I thought,  as I climbed into my cold bed. I masturbated happily for a bit, thinking about her orange pussy but I was too cold and tired to climax.

Next morning, I went shopping to get more wine, cheese and Bath Oliver biscuits, which I found in Selfridges.  I also bought a couple of wine glasses. When I got back to college, before lunch, I looked in my pigeonhole in the porter's lodge, to see if there was any post, There was a letter from my mother and what felt like a card in an envelope addressed to me just by my name, in a beautiful script. I opened the envelope and it was an Athena (the Oxford branch was just a few dozen yards from College) card of a Renoir girl lying on her back and displaying orange hair under her arms (just as C had).  I still have it (top). ''Thank you for being lovely!' it said on the back in the same elegant script. I looked around and saw D, a second year student who had the room next door to mine, looking at me. He looked at the card and I hoped he hadn't seen the writing. He smiled. C and I had run into him on the stairs several times and he always seemed to be in breakfast when we got there.

At lunch I thanked C for the card and remarked on how much it looked like her. She laughed and agreed and said she couldn't resist it. I showed her the Bath Olivers and she was delighted.

Although I had tried to be big and strong for C I was pretty anxious about living away from home for the first time myself and so was glad to have a little friend from the start. One of the things I was most anxious about was Roman Law, which we did in the first term, because a lot of it was in Latin. Law at Oxford didn't require Latin O-level while at Cambridge it did. Still, although you didn't have to be able to write in Latin you did have to be able to read problems in it.  I had done some Latin at school but had given it up before O-level.  Fortunately, C had done the exam and we started to work together on it in our rooms, she helping with the translations. We went to lectures at the Law library together and by the end of the first week we were going everywhere as a pair, including having all of our meals with each other.

That evening I went to her room after dinner and she played me La Bohème, with Maria Callas, on her small cassette player. It was an old recording but then her player was a mono one. It was typical that C liked an old recording because of the life story of Callas rather than a new recording. I was all about the best possible recording quality. We had had more cheese and Bath Oliver biscuits, which I admitted were superior to Jacob's Cream Crackers, This time I had bought a Camembert as I thought it would go better with the opera, something C appreciated. She asked if I had got any drawing things yet but I said that I would have finished my work Friday after my tutorial so could have Saturday afternoon off after our matriculation ceremony. I also needed to explore the terrifying prospect of the college laundry, amongst other things. Although we did academic work every day (because of the short terms things were really intense) I did try to have one day a week off as a 'consolidation day', although in the first term it was often more like once every ten days.

We were lying next to each other, on her narrow bed, listening to Puccini and kissing. The bed was so narrow that I had to lie on my side against the wall with C on her back. She was naked but I was still dressed in just my jeans and she had shown no inclination to try and remove them, so I assumed she was happy with the status quo. I was stroking her body, fondling her breasts and then moving my fingers lower and lower towards her orange fluff. As my fingers slipped down into her copper curls she parted her thighs and I slid my fingers into her wet folds for the first time.

"Oh! she said. I wondered if I had been a bit forward but then given she was now pushing her hips against my hand I thought that she probably didn't mind. I decided to push on and climbed over her leg so that I was kneeling between her pale thighs.  I contemplated C's pink parts nestling in her orange bush and leant forward and began to kiss her thighs and hipbones. C opened her legs even wider and I began to kiss up the inside of her thighs, teasingly avoiding her pussy.  However, after a while, she put her hands behind my head and pulled me towards her juicy oyster, I started to lick her bits and she kept her hands on my head and started to breathe rapidly. "Oh!" she cried, again, clamping my head with her thighs as she came. I wished girls didn't do that. "Kiss me!" she said after a while. I crawled up her and kissed her on the lips, conscious that they were covered in her juices. "Germaine Greer says that most women don't taste their own pussy juice," She said. "But I've always liked my own taste!"

"I like it too!" I said. "You are a delicious girl!"

"I am rather!" she agreed. "You are very lucky!" I couldn't disagree with that.

On Friday morning we had both had our tutorials and afterwards decided to sit in the College law library, getting a good start on the reading for the next week, so that we could have Saturday off. Tutorials consisted of two students going through their previous week's work with the tutor. One would be asked to read out their essay and the other would critique it. It is the main difference between teaching at Oxford and Cambridge and other universities. We did have lectures in the Bodleian law library, which was located in a brutalist building half a mile from college, but these tutorials were at the heart of the teaching experience. You could easily find yourself sat down in the cozy study of the man who had written the text book you had been studying that week, as happened to me in Roman law that first term. You had to be on the top of your game and after more than two hours you came out mentally drained. Fortunately, C and I were not drawn together as tutorial partners as that would have been difficult. 

After dinner we were back in my room again and C had been complaining about having been served battered cod and limp, soggy chips.

"Why do we have to eat fish on Friday just because Catholics do. There aren't that many Catholics in Britain anyway, as they were all burned at the stake!" C's grasp on history was not as strong as her appreciation of the arts. We both agreed, however, as neither of us liked fish, that we would have to make alternative arrangements on Friday for dinner.

"We do need to find something else to eat!" I agreed.

"Other than my pussy, you mean!" she laughed.

I can remember the scene very clearly. I was just dressed in my jeans again, leaning on one elbow, lying on my rug with my legs in front of me in front of the gas fire. C was kneeling naked by my feet. I had just licked her to climax again and her body had a light sheen of perspiration (the gas fire was doing its usual good job). She looked at me.

"I want to dick you," she said.  I confess my mind went blank as to what she was suggesting, as it was not a term I had heard. "Can I dick you?" she said again.  She was reaching for my zip and I suddenly realised what she meant.

"That would be lovely!" I said. By the time she had tugged my jeans and pants off I was completely stiff. The way she approached it, tentatively and gently, made me realise that she hadn't seen one before, as she admitted later. She played with it with her fingers, stroking and rubbing, with a frown of concentration on her face.

"Is that nice? Is that right?" I told her it was all lovely. She held me upright and started to gently rub me.  I now wondered if by "dicking" she just meant manual stimulation but after a while she kissed my knob and embarked on some gentle kissing and licking. I stroked her freckled shoulders. She looked at me, smiled and enveloped my knob with her mouth. It felt so nice and she kept looking at me intently, as she started to bob up and down, looking for reassurance.

"Oh, C, that is really nice!" I said. Her eyes gleamed in pleasure. "In fact it's so nice I'm going to..." She pulled off me and I started to spurt all over her lovely, perky breasts.

"Oh!" she said, laughing. "Golly!" I was still spraying her front like a fire hose. "Lots!"  It was a lot. Half a dozen big spurts.

"Lot's of love!" I said. She giggled and kissed me, still holding my cock. Her chest and belly were completely spattered by my liquefying spunk. She suggested we have a bath together. I had never had a bath with a girl before, although A and I had had a shower once. She put on my green dressing gown and I put on my pyjamas (in what was pretty much the last time I wore them). We opened my door carefully and looked up and down the short corridor my room was on. It was nearly midnight but people lived odd hours at college, especially the lawyers, who were often in the library until gone midnight. The college had its own law library, unusually, so we weren't confined to the times of the main one in the law faculty building.

We furtively started to descend the wooden staircase (which creaked, alarmingly) armed with some of my slightly dodgy Italian soap (a Christmas present, which was, nevertheless, better than the Crimean War period carbolic recipe provided by the college). Much giggling ensued as we dodged people moving about on other floors; having to dive through one of the fire doors at one point, cut along the corridor to the connected staircase and back along the floor below to avoid some people coming up the stairs. Eventually, we reached the basement. It seemed to be even colder than ever and C, who had put her contact lenses to bed for the night, had her glasses on, which immediately steamed up as soon as I turned the taps on, rendering her even more visually impaired than usual. The bath took an age to fill and the amount of steam pouring out made the place look like the engine room of the Titanic. Eventually, we both climbed into the bath but whilst the water was nice and hot, for a change, the air was so cold that we had to try to get under the surface of the water as much as possible. It was a big bath but not that big.  After soaping her perky bust briefly I gave up and we both disappeared back to my room and the welcome warmth of the gas fire. C curled up and fell asleep in front of the fire like a cat (she had many catlike tendencies - claws included) whilst I watched her and wished I had bought some drawing things. Tomorrow, I thought, I would go to WH Smiths for some paper and charcoal.